Agreed. I've had exposure to many managers who's "good attitude for the company" involves looking at employees only as a set of ROI figures. I've also worked under the minority of managers who are interested in developing both the product and skill-set base of employees. The line about "bad attitude" is exactly the attitude that likely founded tech companies in the past - take a new product on the road. Calling this a bad attitude goes against the ideals of several states which have passed provisions protecting the little guys like the OP from being squashed or taken advantage of simply because the company they works for issues the salary checks they get.

Unless he lives in California, where such things are unenforceable, and prohibited from being used as a term of employment or continued employment. The down side to triggering these provisions is that you're responsible for showing that you didn't use the company's resources, including connections to their servers, I'd imagine.

I couldn't agree more. Perhaps this approach would bring about the next few waves of major advancements in other fields that have been stuck for decades.

When was the last time you read a patent for a chemical or biological agent? The substance itself is just a valid a claim under the patent as the process that created it. US Classification 200/157.68 (definition) is one of the classes the resulting patent could land in if the process involves microwave energy.

If the person(s) who solved this challenge realize this, a landmark legal battle over crowd-sourcing for patent-eligible materials could be on the verge of happening.

Conventional wisdom is also called into question here, when the University system is trumped as the best way to continue research in an age when we could see the most significant advances in bio science come from people who are dynamos for complex rules. i.e. Gamers. Will it change? Likely not, the University system does have many advantages. But a decades-old problem solved in 3 weeks, by a single-generation crowd compared to how many layers of research papers on the topic? That's beyond embarrassing.

So you'd favor shutting down one of the greatest advances in technology purely on the grounds that the auxilliary effects would be expensive? Buy a bio-scanning lock and move on. They will become cheaper and cheaper as time goes on. Expense is no excuse to hold a technology this important back. Imagine what would have happened if your logic was considered when decisions about information technology in the early 90s were present? Not building the internet because of the distributed adjustment that needed to happen would have meant immeasurable losses in advancement on many fronts.

Years from now historians will lament over the fall of a nation. The Americas have finally reached a manufacturing technology zenith, and instead of realizing the potential for all if us, "vested" interests will hold all of us back for the sake of "we've always done it this way".

Does anyone here honestly think that China will not use this technology to empower citizens who are more nationally unified than Americans to outright cut imports from the US?

think about the potential plummet in the national debt alone if cheap plastic parts and products were domestic again.

Technical solution? Smalll merge documents, small table of possible storage locations, small table of important keyword combinations, table-valued function that returns a huge list of alpha-numeric "document number, one cartesian product, three million dollars in postage. The department handling these documents would be in quite some trouble if they try to implement a spam filter.

Atheist, as the word would imply, is one without theism. I don't think it's been used in selective context as you have done here. (Zeus, Thor)

At any rate, yes your second statement is always unreasonable to these people. You can't seem to reach their logic centers on this topic, even given the massive contradictions they've read, let alone dichotomy between the book they hold sacred and their beliefs. Womens' Rights were not part of the old or new testament, but you'll find just as fierce opposition when pointing that out - usually in a dismissive wave such as "times change."

I find it sad that these people feel the need to sequester themselves away from the rest of the information on the web. It's doesn't take much to be just-critical enough to get by in a browser, yet their answer is a new service that blacklists most of the net with horrible ranks (or no result at all)